Saturday, September 1, 2007
Oliver Sacks: The Generalist
Pauline Kael said in her review of Awakenings, the Robin Williams film about Oliver Sacks, that the movies' characterization of Sacks missed the subject's large ego. Kael didn't mean that in a disparaging sense, but to say that someone so accomplished had to have a baseline confidence — not as portrayed in the movie, an absent-minded, good-hearted fud.
Sacks is a remarkable fellow who should be proud of himself, speaking as he does with intensity about the world of wonder in which he lives; Sacks is interested in many things, in a scholarly, soft science, detached manner, which has made Columbia University think of him as an artist. The university has appointed Sacks a “Columbia artist”, a designation that could be euphonious only to a university bureaucrat.
Shy and ambitious, Sacks never seemed to me comfortable in the public realm, but apparently things have changed. Sacks says,
I’m excited, because, in a way, I’ve been a sort of an outsider or freelancer or maverick for the last 40 years, and here I think it will be quite an intense sort of full relationship with Columbia.”
Sacks is a 19th century generalist in a compartmentalized age of narrow specialization. We could use more like him.